Brian Brady's new production of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, sung in Jeremy Sams's English translation and performed in a reduced orchestration by Geoff Boyd, is quietly and discreetly updated. The lack of intrusive director trickery is to be commended. But, much more importantly, Brady and his cast have found a strength and individuality in all of the main characters that heightens the work's tensions, both social and sexual.
It's not at all unusual for the women in productions of Figaro to overshadow the men. The Countess and Susanna have right and virtue on their side, and Colette Delahunt, a Susanna who's in all senses able, and Sally Harrison , a touchingly burdened Countess, win sympathy with enviable ease. But in this production there's an air of self-awareness about their paradoxically more vulnerable other halves - Wyn Pencarreg, the resourceful Figaro, and Charles Johnston, the philandering Count - which makes the men a lot more than cardboard figures. Johnston does take his recitative rather too far beyond the reach of singing for musical comfort, but Pencarreg hardly makes a wrong move from beginning to end. Rachel Fisher's Cherubino treads the fine line of self-parody with variable success, the often coltish behaviour uncomfortably counterparted by a vocal line that's not always rewardingly stable. In the production's purely comic turns, Martyn Sharp makes up for an unsettled Bartolo through his well-timed interventions as Antonio, and James Nelson camps it up as he doubles the roles of Basilio and Curzio. Riona Bradley brings a suitably unpleasant edge to her grasping Marcellina.
Jamie Vartan's box set unfolds outwards with ingenious simplicity between the pairs of acts into which OTC divide the opera, accommodating all the intricate comings and goings with ease save for the nocturnal encounters in the garden of Act IV.
With a strengthened string section, the Opera Theatre Orchestra under Andrew Synnott mostly sounds well, though at times it was a bit too strong in projection in the accommodating acoustic of the Mullingar Arts Centre. Parts of the overture, however, were snatched at, and in the opera's most hectic moments all semblance of ensemble between singers and musicians was lost. There's a rigidity in Synnott's beat which makes its way too consistently into the playing, and a stiffness in his accompaniment of recitatives, which are a stark contrast to the intimate flexibility he has achieved when directing even smaller opera ensembles from the piano.
